Telling Tales on Myself

I know the beauty of a blog is its anonymity. Blabbing away into cyberspace to people who don’t know you, right? It really frees a person up to reveal anything stupid about herself. Or himself. But in my case, this blog is read mainly by people who actually know me so the whole anonymity angle is kind of a non-starter. So I had to decide whether I wanted to relate the following story which makes me look like a pathetic ass, but it is so physiologically interesting that I can’t resist.

A little background. A few years ago there was a young gentleman who worked in my building and who I thought was attractive. At least one reader of this blog already knows of him as the “Cafeteria Guy”, the cafeteria being the only place I ever ran into him. We chatted a couple of times, but in one of those mysterious, confounding cases of crossed signals or missed signals or whatever the hell it was, we stopped talking. Then his department moved to another building and essentially he disappeared. I rarely ran into him after the move. And if I did, we did not speak. He had not crossed my mind in many months.

Back to today. After work I head down to our gym. It is a small gym and very few employees use it. Those of us who do, all know each other. So I’m expecting to see a couple of regulars, but when I walk in, who is the only person using the gym? Yep, Cafeteria Guy. I stop dead in my tracks, then recover quickly, and walk in. He nods and says hi, I nod and say hi. But while my exterior is nodding and casually saying hi, my insides are going HOLY SMOKE! What’s HE doing here???

I go into the changing room still thinking YIKES! So I change and put on my heart rate monitor. And here is the funny part. Normally when I first put on the heart rate monitor, my rate is around 85. But now I switch it on and it's already at 115 ! Shock = adrenaline rush = elevated heart rate. Isn’t that bizarre? I switch it off, and then switch it on again. It's still at 113. It’s an Uma Thurman moment.

I was tempted to tell him that seeing him elevated my heart rate by 30 points, but that would make me look like a very scary head case. So I said nothing. I think his ego is sufficiently large as is.

Nothing else happened. When I went out, he was very inelegantly hurling himself off the treadmill and said that he was terrified of injuring himself on it and then he was gone. But he did have a piece of paper with a workout program on it, so perhaps I shall be testing my heart rate monitor again soon.